Wednesday, February 19, 2014

As we look around at the Police State being built across the world, combined with enhanced mind control techniques, it is easy to draw direct parallels with books like 1984 and Brave New World. It's almost as if these books formed a clear blueprint for anyone seeking control over large populations.

With the quickening pace of technological advancement it is no surprise to see "ideas" become reality quicker than ever before. Philip K. Dick explored the concept of pre-crime in his short story "The Minority Report" in 1956, but it wasn't until Steven Spielberg offered it on the big screen as Minority Reportin 2002 that the audience got a true look at a potential day-to-day existence under corporate and government data management and control.

We are now at the point where "Minority Report" is being used as a sound description of current technological applications, even in mainstream news, which means that the future is actually the present. Below you will find 10 signs that we have now entered the world depicted in fiction.

The latest news from Chicago only adds to this list, as police are moving beyond simply possessing the technology and are now putting it into effect.

Chicago's "Heat List" is an index of approximately 400 people who have been identified by a computer algorithm as being future threats to commit violent crime. Without having actually committed a crime, some of those on the list are beginning to get visits from Chicago police warning them that they are already being watched:

When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, "I haven't done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn't done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.

Chicago is apparently considering this to be part of "policing in the 21st century." A report from The Verge explains how Chicago has taken the lead in predictive behavior police tech:

In 2009, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) made millions of dollars in grants available for any police department with a burgeoning predictive program. Police all over the country applied to tap into those NIJ dollars. The big winner was Chicago; its combination of headline-making homicide rates and already established data- and tech-focused policing made it a perfect fit. The CPD received more than $2 million to test two phases of its experimental program.

Though it took awhile to get started in earnest (staff turnover and internal politics in 2011 and 2012 stalled the project), last year the CPD’s predictive program picked up steam. One man behind that progress was Miles Wernick.

Wernick is the Motorola professor and director of the Medical Imaging Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. He says he’s been doing predictive analysis work since the 1980s, when he worked with the US military to recognize potential targets in the battlefield. From there he proceeded to medical imaging. A lot of his current work focuses on analysing data and brain scans to make automated diagnoses of dementias in elderly patients — not exactly police work.

These paragraphs encapsulate two of the major warnings that the alternative media has been shouting for years: namely that military tech always trickles down into local law enforcement; and, secondly, that Big Data initiatives which are heralded by the establishment as solutions in the computing and medical fields have a range of privacy-killing additional applications that affect people far beyond the initially stated reach.

Also highlighted are the same concerns that are cropping up in the area of NSA spying - association is an assumption of tendency toward eventual guilt. Miles Wernick goes on to say:

"It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot," he says. "It has to do with the person’s relationships to other violent people."

This is in line with what Andrew Papachristos, a Yale sociologist and Chicago native, calls a social networking theory. When it comes to violence, Papachristos recently told Chicago Magazine, "It’s not just about your friends and who you’re hanging out with, it’s actually the structure of these networks that matter."

So while Wernick acknowledges that sometimes people such as Robert McDaniel — who haven’t been convicted of a violent crime — may find themselves in the wrong social networks, their presence on the list is not random.

A commander of the program stated it even more simply:

If you end up on that list, there’s a reason you’re there.

This indicates a fundamental shift in the way policing will be done in the future of America. Until now, we have been reporting on this type of technology and have been forced to speculate about its coming implementation. Well, now there is no doubt. And lest anyone believe that this is just an outcropping of Chicago's notoriously Police State-happy mentality, Police Commander Jonathan Lewin matter-of-factly states the following:

This [program] will become a national best practice. This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives. [emphasis added]

Whether it will actually save lives is debatable. Has the No-Fly List saved lives? Have any of the other of the many lists one can be added to these days actually saved any lives? These lists are secretive and have become nearly impossible to independently verify as to how someone got on the list, if they deserve to be there; and, if not, how to get off the list ... or if the lists are effective.

The Verge article linked below highlights the potential racial profiling of such policies - and indeed this has happened in the case of New York's own low-tech Stop-and-Frisk policy.

So the verdict is out on saving lives. But one thing is for certain: the arrival of the high-tech Police State is certainly not about saving freedom, nor is it about preserving a Constitution designed to protect us from a Minority Report society.

Individual pieces of news often get lost or forgotten rather easily in today's fast-paced news cycle, so let's look at an aggregate of 10 mainstream news items that offer a comprehensive picture of where we are and where we are likely to be headed both from a government surveillance standpoint, as well as targeted advertising.

3.The Long Eye of the Law: So Who's Ready for a 'Minority Report'-Style Future?Motherboard, 3/20/2013: On Monday, Japanese tech developers Fujitsu announced they had created . . . a bit of technology that can measure a person’s pulse using a camera or a computer webcam, just by analyzing that person’s face . . . It’s Minority Report-style technology, to be sure—another in a burgeoning list of tech-driven ways police could prevent crimes before they happen."

6.Gesture Through News Minority Report-Style With New York Times' Leap Motion App, Fast Company, 7/18/2013: Rather than having to flick through headlines on a touch-screen device or scroll through articles using a mouse -- how antiquated! -- the company's new app allows readers to navigate through stories by motioning their hands in mid-air, with Leap Motion sensors interpreting the signals . . . The New York Times has also suggested it will give the company an opportunity to implement new advertising capabilities 'that [will] allow brands to connect with readers using motion-controlled ad units.'"

9.Minority Report-style Advertising Coming to NYC, 247Sports, 8/8/2013: "Recycling bins data mine your smartphone when you are in proximity to tailor ads when you walk by the screen and stuff. Already in London, looking to expand to NYC and other World cities soon."

10.Google Submits Patent For Minority Report Style Eye Tracking Device, Prison Planet, 8/15/2013: "The patent filing describes a “head mounted device”, for example hi-tech glasses, that would have the ability to track eye movement, effectively monitoring reactions to external stimuli, including changes in emotion." From The Verge: "Google could be betting that advertisers will pay to know whether consumers are actually looking at their billboards, magazine spreads, and online ads."

From the patent application, which was filed in May 2011:

Pay per gaze advertising need not be limited to on-line advertisements, but rather can be extended to conventional advertisement media including billboards, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of conventional print media. Thus, the gaze tracking system described herein offers a mechanism to track and bill offline advertisements in the manner similar to popular online advertisement schemes.

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The ways that we are tracked, traced, and databased are increasing every day. Some of it is arriving without our agreement and is being utilized by private corporations and governments without our explicit approval, as the recent revelations of data spying have exposed. If we have learned one thing it is that information is knowledge and knowledge is power. The power of data collection in the hands of those who wish to exert more control is not likely to halt. And all indications show that it is not enough to have logged and charted where we have been; the surveillance state wants to know where we are going.

However, we ought to be aware that much of our data is willingly being given via social media and the gadgets we choose to buy. As technology continues to march forward at an exponential rate, we might do well to consider how much of this we are comfortable buying into. And if we must, should we be seeking ways to subvert the information stream?

10 comments:

to round out your article, just read this reviewhttps://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_nsa_the_abyss_from_which_there_is_no_return

His best line is:

" So if we already knew that the government was spying on us, what’s the big deal? And more to the point, as I often hear many Americans ask, if you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you care?

"The big deal is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. And once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution."

CANNOT BUT EMPHASIZE IMPORTANCE OF BLACK GOOSE THEORY.It is not perfect and in order to make it come out pefect you behead the black goose and make it whiteThe instance above where young man although never a criminal the factors or !10 million data points say he is a black goose opportu ity and so the interact to attempt to insure he never becomes one.If young man grows old and never commits a crime they call it successfull and if those hundreds of statistical probabilitys within his initial group finds but even above a 3% blak geese incidents what onc was just avphysical warning becomes a permanent interference in his life and even long term incarceration. For a minor, likely to reoffend, to lack of occupatioal restrictions and on no fly list or being near children, no community volunteer ball coach, or in positions of possible compromise.Why you out wLking your dog in the dark mister? Says here you got a lot of aquaintences who burglrize houses So you out casing the homes? Maybe you best walk that dog or better yet some of your people went to dog fights so just get rid of dog. At the pound and we will be checking to make sure youdo. STILLWORKING Wshing dishes at pspa jos hash houuse? Have a good noight. WELCOME TO YOUR FUTURE, PEONs.

Right now I am on Federal Probation. I have been eligible for release from probation for the past six months, have not committed a crime, have not failed a urine screen, have gainful employment and do not associate with anyone who has been convicted of a crime. However, I cannot be released from probation because a computer has predicted that I am a "moderate risk of reoffending". They will not tell me why the computer has made this decision, only that in order to be released from probation I would have to be at least a "low risk of reoffending." It has been suggested that the reasons for my classification have something to do with my mental health diagnosis and treatment. Let me tell you, it feels downright Orwellian.

Ancient predictive technologies would have left all newborn children with disabilities outside the city walls to become part of the night fed wild predators. Calling it the cycle of life gave some solice to the parents outside their own heartfelt guilt for superstitious energies. Today we are replaceing it with machines that are already building themselves in a fiscally corrupt environment trying to keep up with evolutionary rates unprecidented in our cultural histories. With the marginal and disenfranchised being told of their own drag on production, those that produce nothing more than peace of mind are turning the world into their own rendition of utopia. As you sow, so shall you reap.

Minority report was not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that many technologies and "Orwellian" schemes seem to follow "entertainment". They purposely do this to get people to accept as inevitable, what they are planning to roll out. Control the information, frame the debate. 1984 was not a dystopian warning about out of control big government power. George Orwell was a self described socialist. Socialist by definition is government intervention into every aspect of people's lives. Socialists do not see this as indicative of "out of control government". Orwell would roll over in his grave if he knew his work was today being presented as a warning against his preferred version of the nanny state. Orwell wrote 1984 as a diatribe not against "big government" but against the "wrong kind" of big government. His boogeyman was Fascism, like every left fellow traveler. Every Communist has a word for heretic, Fascist. Every Fascist has a word for heretic, Communist/Socialist. They both simply mean an all powerful central government that DICTATES to the people what "rights" they are ALLOWED to have, as opposed to rights that inherently belong to all people.

Nail on the head. The created wars of the 'isms' has raged long before our earliest writings address, Wars are created to breed hate and fear, which the sinisteri feed upon.....the more war, the stronger they grow. These evil entities employ people through the lure of sin that results in power....the draw of the psychopath. Wealth, in our conventional sense is triflings to them- grains of sand, and equally regarded. Power and fame is thje crack, and they are the silent street corner dwellers.

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